This post was published long before the Mists of Pandara Expansion.
The tips and techniques explained here may be outdated.

Achievement and the codification of fun

Lilac’s two most recent achievements:Mine Sweeper Get caught in 10 consecutive land mine explosions in the Sparksocket Minefield without landing.Ultimate Triage Use a Heavy Frostweave Bandage to heal another player or yourself with less than 5% health.

I decided that a good “before I go to bed” use of extra strudle was bouncing around in the Mines at K3. It only took 3 days of having left-over food from raiding to get the achievements. The “Triage” one was kind of accidental.
Now the interesting question.. is why? Why spend time, energy, frustration to get an achievement with no actual reward?

I think for me it’s the completionist mentality. Looking in the Achievements tab.. and seeing one I could get.. means there would be one-less achievement undone in that tab. A check-mark on my to-do list.

We had things like this before Wrath. I’d heard of people raiding Naxx with no pants. A whole raid.. with no pants. To see if they could. Or raiding Deadmines naked.. and you only get to put on gear as you pick it up. We did it for entertainment. We did it for fun.

But fun doesn’t seem to be a good enough reason. Who -really- would raid OS with 3 drakes up.. if the only benefit was to be able to say “We did it with three drakes up?” Making the fight harder for better loot has a lot more traction than just “make it harder”.

So.. do people still do the unofficial “achievements”? I honestly can’t think of any.
AND
Would you do “make it harder” raiding achievements.. if the only reward was to be able to say “we did this”?

I’m pretty “meh” on achievements… I like them from the completionist stand point, but also won’t beat myself up to do them. I’ve also heard of plenty of people that still do weird stuff for their own entertainment.

One of my favorite passtimes on the Sons of Hodir daily when you kill the drake was to try and time when I did the killing blow so as to fall on someone farming below. I just imagine what the person might think when a drake falls out of the sky, dead, and this extremely confident warlock struts out all like: Yeah, that just happened.